MADRID.- The exhibition Olga Picasso, presented at CaixaForum Madrid, is the first in-depth exploration of the years that Pablo Picasso and Olga Khokhlova shared as a couple, from their meeting in 1917 to their separation in the mid-nineteen-thirties. Through a large selection of personal documents – some of them shown here for the first time – the exhibition invites visitors to rediscover the “Olga period” and the works it generated, while also examining the personal and existential context in which they were created, and revealing the distance that sometimes separates the model from her image as represented in the painter’s works.

The starting-point for the project is Olga’s travel trunk, which is included in the exhibition. This trunk was rediscovered by Bernard Ruiz-Picasso, the grandson of Pablo and Olga and one of the exhibition curators. Marked with the initials O.P., the trunk was kept in an empty room in the mansion in Boisgeloup inherited by couple’s only child, Paulo, after Olga’s death. It contained letters and photographs of the ballerina that enabled a reconstruction of a personal and artistic narrative that runs parallel to another political and social history. “In some of the drawers there were, among other things, photographs still in their Kodak envelopes. Photographs that told the story of my grandmother's life: Olga with Picasso, Olga with my father, my father's childhood, trips to Barcelona, Monte Carlo, the sculpture studio in Boisgeloup, etc. In other drawers there were letters in French and Russian, tied in fine pink or blue silk ribbons. There were also dancing shoes, tutus, a crucifix, an orthodox Bible in Russian, personal effects and ballet programmes”, recalls the couple's grandson.

All this material fuelled the research that resulted in the exhibition’s premiere in Paris in 2017, marking centenary of the couple’s first meeting. The show was subsequently presented in Moscow and Malaga. Olga Picasso was made possible thanks to the collaboration of four international art institutions. The exhibition that now opens at CaixaForum Madrid was organised by the Musée national Picasso-Paris and the Almine y Bernard Ruiz-Picasso Fundación para el Arte in cooperation with ”la Caixa”, the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts of Moscow and the Museo Picasso Málaga.

This is, then, the first exhibition to focus on Picasso’s “Olga period”. Documents and personal effects belonging to Olga Khokhlova enabled the construction of a narrative that fuses Picasso’s artistic evolution during the years with Olga, when she was his favourite model, with the life of the couple, marked by love and disillusionment, as well as Olga’s maternity and her anguish due to the terrible experiences of her family in Russia.

The exhibition is curated by Emilia Philippot, curator of Paintings and Drawings at the Musée national Picasso-Paris; Joachim Pissarro, Professor of Art History and Director of the Hunter College Art Galleries of the City University of New York; and Bernard Ruiz-Picasso, co-chair of the Almine y Bernard Ruiz-Picasso Fundación para el Arte.

The exhibition features 335 pieces from the Musée national Picasso-Paris and the Almine y Bernard Ruiz-Picasso Fundación para el Arte. These include 41 paintings, 74 drawings, 1 sculpture, 12 notebooks, 12 graphic works, 167 photographs, 13 letters and postcards, 3 articles of furniture and 12 previously unshown films.

From melancholy to jealousy
“I am Olga Khokhlova, the niece of the Tsar”. These were the first words spoken by the Ukrainian ballerina when, in 1917, in a theatre dressing room, Jean Cocteau introduced her to Pablo Picasso during performances by Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in Rome. The daughter of a colonel in the Russian imperial army, Olga Khokhlova (Nezhin, Ukraine, 1891 - Cannes, France, 1955) had joined the Ballets Russes, a prestigious and innovative dance company led by Sergei Diaghilev, in 1911. Picasso later began to collaborate with the company, creating sets and costumes for the ballet Parade, which featured music by Erik Satie.

It seems that Picasso fell in love with the Ukrainian dancer at first sight. He was 36 years old and she was 27. Olga became the female figure most frequently portrayed in the master’s art since the end of the nineteen-tens, occupying a central place particularly in the early-nineteen-twenties. The couple married in Paris on 12 July 1918, with Jean Cocteau, Max Jacob and Guillaume Apollinaire as their witnesses.

In the early days of their relationship, Olga the muse and model is usually depicted in Picasso’s paintings with a cold, rather melancholy image, in a series of works featuring fine, elegant lines, that mark the artist’s return to classicism and the figurative style, clearly influenced by Ingres. Picasso portrays Olga reading, writing, in a melancholy attitude, pensive, while in the photographs she appears much happier. For their part, the letters from those times reveal the personal drama caused by her separation from her family, who were badly affected by events after the outbreak of the Russian Revolution.

The exhibition allows visitors to observe Picasso’s work process during these early days in paintings like a Portrait of Olga in an Armchair (1918), a work whose background is incomplete, which can be compared to a photograph attributed to Émile Delétang in which the model adopts the same pose and wears the same striking attire.

Following the birth of their first child, Paulo, on 4 February 1921, Olga and the child became the inspiration for numerous scenes of motherhood in such works as Maternity (1921) and Family at the Seashore (1922). These paintings, tender and serene, reveal Picasso's new interest in Antiquity and the Renaissance. Little Pablo is Picasso's pride and joy, and in his charming portraits of the boy dressed up as Harlequin and Pierrot the artist returns to the characters of the Commedia dell’Arte with which he had identified himself in his youth during the Pink Period. In another portrait, he shows his son busy at drawing, perhaps hoping to revive the feelings that he also felt as a child and a painter's son.

However, Picasso's depictions of Olga are transformed after the artist’s meeting in 1927 with Marie-Thérèse Walter, a 17 year old girl who would become his mistress. Picasso began to represent Olga in a deformed and even violent way, not only because of their marital crisis and the jealousy of his wife, who knew that he was being unfaithful to her, but also due to the influence of the Surrealist movement. In a masterpiece like Large Nude on a Red Armchair (1929), the female body is sheer pain, and two years later, in the oil painting The Kiss, Picasso seems to suggest a relationship of cannibalism rather than a loving gesture.

In the early-nineteen-thirties, Picasso identifies himself in his work as a minotaur in order to symbolise the complexity of his relationships with women. As the curator Emilia Philippot explains, “the Picassian minotaur is wild and cruel and accepts his tragic destiny, but he is also depicted as blind, the victim of the spell cast by Marie-Thérèse Walter”. His turbulent marital life is also expressed in crucifixions and bullfighting scenes. One of the most iconic yet less well-known works from this period is Crucifixion (1932).

The couple separated in 1935, things suddenly coming to a head after the birth of Maya, Picasso’s daughter with Marie-Thérèse. His last two portraits of Olga date to 1936. In them, Picasso paints Olga, still his wife, as a woman looking at herself in a black mirror. The couple remained legally married until Olga’s death in 1955. Devastated by solitude and pain, she wrote to Picasso almost daily throughout the years of their separation.

A publication in Spanish has been prepared to mark this exhibition. In it, articles by the curators, Bernard Ruiz-Picasso, Joachim Pissarro and Emilia Philippot, are accompanied by texts by Emilie Bouvard, Thomas Chaineux, Caroline Eliacheff, José Lebrero and Charles Stuckey. The 312 pages of this catalogue are richly illustrated by many of the works, photographs and documents featured in the show.